Wednesday, April 29, 2015

With the unrest in Baltimore making headline news in recent days, I wanted to take a look at some background information on deaths in Maryland that are related to encounters with the state's various police forces. A recent briefing paper by the ACLU looks at the
statistics on deaths in police encounters in Maryland between 2010 and 2014.
Here are some of the highlights.

Let's open with this table showing the demographics of Maryland showing the ethnic and racial breakdown of the state:

Now, let's look at some of the statistics from the briefing paper:

1.) At least 109 people
died in police encounters in Maryland over the years between 2010 and 2014.
During the same time period, four police officers died in civilian
encounters including two in vehicle pursuits, one was shot in a raid and one
was shot when off-duty and working as a security guard.

As shown on this
chart, these deaths were scattered widely throughout the state:

2.) The age range of
those that died ranged from 15 to 78 with an average age of 35 years.
Nearly one-third of those who died were 25 years of age or younger.

3.) Of those who died in
a police encounter, 75 were black (69 percent of the total), 30 were white and
three were identified as Hispanic. To put the number of blacks killed into
perspective, blacks make up 28 percent of Maryland's total population.
When the racial composition is normalized, the rate at which blacks died
per population size was five times that of whites.

4.) Of those who died, 86
people or 79 percent were killed by police gunfire. Of those, 22 or 26
percent had no weapon of any kind.

5.) Of those who died, 23
people or 21 percent were not shot by police. In those cases, police used
handcuffs or other restraints, tasers or pepper spray.

6.) Of those who died, 45
were not armed with a weapon of any kind, 38 had a gun, 11 had a knife, 8 had
an airgun or fake gun and 7 had an object that was defined by police as a
weapon, including a pen.

7.) Of those who died, 41
people or 38 percent were presented in a way that suggested either a medical or
psychological health issue or that they were suffering from the use of an illicit substance. Their behavior was often
characterized as bizarre or erratic.

8.) In one case, a 26-year old white male with Down's
Syndrome died as a result of "asphyxiation by homicide" on January 12, 2013 when off-duty
sheriff's officers moonlighting as mall security guards attacked him because he
didn't buy another $12.00 movie ticket so that he could watch "Zero Dark
Thirty" for a second time. The case went to a grand jury which
declined to indict the three officers involved. As well, the Frederick County police investigated themselves and found that they were not guilty of any wrongdoing.

Out of all 109 cases over
the five year period, there were only two cases where a Maryland police officer
faced criminal charges relating to the death of a civilian. In both
cases, the office was off-duty. One officer was convicted and the other
officer, charged in the choking death of a 17 year old boy in July
2012, was acquitted.

The data from this
briefing paper shows us that civilian deaths during interactions with police in
Maryland are not isolated events; over the past five years alone, an average of
just under 22 civilians have died every year after an encounter with one of
Maryland's police forces. For a state with a population of just under 6 million people with its largest urban area that has only 622,000 people, that's a lot of civilian deaths at the hands of the police.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

When the rate of economic
growth slows down, particularly in the first quarter of the year, the
mainstream media seems to focus on the "fact" that bad winter weather
has had a negative impact on consumer spending which is responsible for about
70 percent of GDP. A recent study by Justin Bloesch and Francois
Gourio at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago looks at the connection between
the fairly bad weather in the first quarter of 2014 and the slowing of the
economy in the same quarter.

In case you've already
forgotten, here is an example of the type of story that
circulated in the mainstream media when Q1 2014 GDP growth stumbled:

Among the issues that
connected the weather to the stalling economy were stories about employees who
couldn't get to work, construction sector supply chains that were interrupted
and households that delayed making retail purchases because they were spending
more on heating costs and repairing storm damaged homes.

Here is a figure showing
six economic indicators and how they were impacted with each of the three dots
representing December 2013, January 2014 and February 2014:

While there was clearly a
somewhat of a slowdown, it was unclear whether the slowdown was due to winter
weather or another unrelated underlying trend. At the time, the cause of
the slowdown was particularly important because the Federal Reserve Open Market
Committee had decided in December 2013 that it would start to taper its
purchases of assets because the economy was showing some strength. The
challenge facing the FOMC was to disentangle how much of the economic weakness
was weather related and how much was caused by outside forces. This is
more difficult than one might expect given that aggregate snowfall and
temperature data are area weighted (i.e. they represent a geographic
area) rather than being population weighted. In other words, if
winter temperatures are much colder than normal and snowfall amounts are much
higher over less populated areas, the potential impact of harsh weather on the
economy will be much lower than if the colder temperatures and increased
snowfall amounts take place in a more populated region. The goal of the
research in this paper was to provide us with more robust statistical evidence
regarding the effects of the weather on economic activity.

Let's start by looking at
the weather side of the equation to see whether the winter of 2013 - 2014 was actually
harsher than normal. The authors' source of weather measurements data was
taken from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. This data set has
daily measures of temperature, snowfall and total precipitation from 1200
weather stations throughout the United States over the past 65 years. The
authors then calculated the monthly deviation or the difference between the
monthly average temperature and the long-run normal temperature. The
temperature data is then averaged across all stations in a state and then
aggregated the state data (weighted to their employment) to regional (i.e.
Midwest, West, Northeast and South) and national weather indices. The
authors then did the same thing to the snowfall data.

These two figures show
the entire national record of both temperature and snowfall deviation
from the late 1940s to 2014:

It is quite clear that on
a weighted national basis, temperatures were lower and snowfall amounts were
higher during the winter of 2013 - 2014.

Now, let's look at how
much of an impact that the weather had on economic activity using the authors'
state-level model as shown on this table:

1.) At its peak, the
weather contributed negatively to the growth of non-farm employment over the
period from November to March to the tune of -0.04 percent in the month of
February or about 50,000 to 60,000 jobs. By March, there was no impact of
weather on non-farm employment and by April and May (plus 0.03 percent in each
month), the weather effects on non-farm employment were completely reversed.

2.) The weather effect on
the unemployment rate was negative in both November and December (-0.02 and
-0.03 percent respectively and was positive in February, pushing the
unemployment rate up by 0.06 percent. By March, the impact of weather on
the unemployment rate was back to zero percent.

3.) The peak impact of
weather on the number of new unemployment insurance claims took place in
February when new claims were up by 0.98 percent. New claims dropped by
0.07 percent in January and 0.31 percent in March, again, showing that the
weather effect on new U.I. claims was short-lived at best.

4.) At its peak, weather
contributed negatively to housing permits during the month of February when the
number of new permits declined by 1.04 percent. Once again, by March, new
housing permits had risen by 1.11 percent, completely reversing the losses of
the previous month.

5.) The weather effect on
housing starts was negative in February, dropping by 0.67 percent. By
March and April, this weather-related decline had been reversed when housing
starts rose by 0.22 percent and 3.35 percent respectively. It is
interesting to note that the weather impact on housing starts was actually more
significant in November 2013 (-1.71 percent) than it was during the depths of
winter.

In addition, when using
the national model, the authors found that the results were less clear.
The number of hours worked fell by 0.60 percent in February of which 0.19
percent is attributable to the weather. Utility production grew by 3.3
percent in January of which 0.52 percent is attributable to the weather.

The authors' conclusions
show that weather does have an impact on economic activity, however, in the
case of the winter of 2013 - 2014, the effect was very short-lived, generally
negatively impacting economic growth for little more than a month. In
addition, the effect of weather is not very large, even though the winter
weather in 2013 - 2014 was relatively severe when compared to historical records.
The authors' also note that the timing of the decline varied for many of
the economic indicators with some indicators declining in December, others in
January, February or March or a combination of months. This tells us that
the bad weather during the winter does not account entirely for the weak
economy during that period and that other factors must have been at play,
factors which include a correction in inventory levels and the impact of
foreign trade.

Monday, April 27, 2015

As a geoscientist, the occurrence of a significant earthquake is always of interest to me. Since many people really don't understand why "the earth moves", I will use this posting to explain why the recent earthquake in
Nepal that has killed thousands of people took place and why such an event is likely to be repeated in the future, just as it has in the past.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, geologists and geophysicists discovered that the earth's crust, the outermost and thinnest layer of the globe, was formed of a number of plates that "float" on the earth's mantle. These plates have moved throughout the hundreds of millions of years of geological time, creating and destroying continents and oceans. When two or more of these plates collide, they can form a subduction zone where one plate is thrust over top of another plate. There are two main types of subduction zone; the first occurs when a plate of oceanic crust is subjected under a plate of continental crust (oceanic - continental convergence) and the second occurs when two plates of continental crust collide (continental - continental convergence). Here is a schematic section showing what an oceanic - continental convergence looks like:

The down-sliding plate will melt as it is subducted into the earth's mantle; as the melted continental crust rises, it forms a chain of volcanoes and a series of along the margins of the over-riding plate as it is crushed by the plate that is being subducted. A prime example of this geological phenomenon can be found along the western margin of North America and is the driving force behind the most recent significant volcanic eruption of our lifetime, Mount St. Helens.

In the case of the Himalayan tectonic region, Nepal's
major mountain terrain is being formed as two continental plates collide; in this case, the Tibetan/Eurasian plate is colliding with the Indian plate as the Indian plate moves northward as shown on this diagram:

The geological framework of
the Himalayas can be simply thought of as two continents colliding with each
other, resulting in one continent pushing up another. As the stresses of
the collision build, they are released as earthquakes along the multitude of
faults that cross the region. In many ways this process is similar to the
process that formed the Cordillera of North America which most of us know as
the Rocky Mountains. In that case, a series of smaller island arcs
located on the Pacific plate collided with the western margin of the North
American plate, pushing the earth's crust up into a long mountain chain that
runs the length of North America.

As the Indian plate is
subducted under the Eurasian plate, it pushes the continental crust upwards,
forming the formidable Himalayan plate as shown on this block diagram:

This collision results in significant shortening of the earth's crust as the earth's crust is thrusted upwards creating the Himalayan mountain chain; in the case of the Himalayan fold belt, a 2010 paper by Long et al suggests that there has been at least 344 to 405 kilometers of crustal shortening across the Himalayas. This amounts to between 70 and 75 percent shortening.Geologists believe that
the Himalayan Range is one of the younger mountain systems in the world with
the collision first taking place around 55 million years ago. The process
that formed the mountains is still occurring with the Indian plate moving
northward at a rate of about 5 centimetres per year. It is this forward
drift and ongoing collision that creates the seismic activity which is
manifested as earthquakes.

The 2400 kilometer-long
Himalayas can be divided into several geological or tectonic zones that are
each separated by major thrust faults as shown on these diagrams:

Approximately one-third
of the Himalayan range lies within the boundaries of Nepal.

Here is a cross section
showing the physiography of the Himalayas:

As I noted above, the
Himalayan mountains are crossed by a series of faults of the thrust (faults
where one side moves vertically with respect to the other) and slip-strike
faults (faults where one side moves laterally with respect to the other).
Some regions of the Himalayas are far more heavily faulted than others,
particularly the central Himalayas found in Nepal. In the Western and
Central parts of Nepal, there are mainly thrust faults and in Eastern Nepal,
there are mainly strike-slip and thrust faults.

Let's close this brief
posting with a map showing the seismic regions of Nepal
that also shows the numerous earthquakes that have taken place since the early
1800s:

Nepal and the Himalayas
in general are one of the world's most seismically active areas. The
complex tectonic setting of the region has made it a focus study area for the
world's seismologists who are trying to gain a better understanding of the
tectonic framework of the region so that, in the future, they may be able to
predict the occurrence of significant earthquakes through changes in seismicity
patterns.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Now that Hillary Clinton
is in the thick of her second campaign to become President of the United
States, I wanted to take a look at one of her fundraising groups that was
raising funds well before she announced her candidacy.

The Ready for Hillary PAC has been a
significant fundraiser for Hillary Clinton since early 2013 as shown on this
Statement of Organization made to the Federal Election Commission:

By the middle of 2013,
this single PAC had raised $1,253,943 as shown on this screen capture:

Here is a screen capture
showing the quarterly, semi-annual and year-end receipts, disbursements and
cash on hand for the Ready for Hillary PAC:

Here is a pie chart
showing the sources of funds for the Ready for Hillary PAC over the past two
years:

In total, over the past
two years, Ready for Hillary has raised $12,913,434 with individual
contributions totalling $4,437,909 with $3,167,482 being itemized contributions from
2780 donors and "other receipts" totalling $8,435,194 from 7953
donors.

Alice
Walton - Heiress to the Walton Fortune and 8th wealthiest American

William
Rudin - CEO of Rudin Management and member of 58th richest American
family

Here is a look at the
largest donors found under the "Other Receipts":

Among "Other
Receipts" we find:

Warren Buffet - Second wealthiest American who needs
no further explanation

Here is a pie chart showing what the Ready for
Hillary PAC has spent its ample funds on:

Here are the largest
expenditures to the end of 2014:

Windward
Strategies, the largest recipient of Ready for Hillary spending thus
far, is a "full service, direct response fundraising firm that specialized
in comprehensive direct marketing services to leading non-profit, political
organizations, national and state campaigns.". Rising
Tide Interactive is a "data-driven
digital advertising agency with a personal approach and a history of winning
results for our clients.". Over the past two election cycles,
Rising Tide Interactive has helped Democrats win nine US Senate races and
seven gubernatorial elections. It is interesting to see that Ready For Hillary even accounts for travel by Uber and meals from 7-Eleven as shown on this form:

Once again, it is
interesting to see how easy it is to raise a massive amount of money in
American federal politics from the wealthiest among us. What is even more
interesting is to see that the Ready for Hillary PAC was able to raise nearly
$13 million over a two year period and their preferred candidate hadn't even
announced her candidacy.

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About Me

I have been an avid follower of the world's political and economic scene since the great gold rush of 1979 - 1980 when it seemed that the world's economic system was on the verge of collapse. I am most concerned about the mounting level of government debt and the lack of political will to solve the problem. Actions need to be taken sooner rather than later when demographic issues will make solutions far more difficult. As a geoscientist, I am also concerned about the world's energy future; as we reach peak cheap oil, we need to find viable long-term solutions to what will ultimately become a supply-demand imbalance.